Prompt of the Week: The AI Press Audit

Hi Reader,

Google just redefined what "visibility" means for your brand, and most communications teams don't know it yet.

At Google I/O this week, the company announced that AI Mode — the conversational search experience that synthesizes answers from across the web — has now surpassed one billion monthly users. Queries are doubling every quarter. And new data show that brands cited in AI answers earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than non-cited competitors for the same queries.

Read that again: being named in an AI answer now delivers stronger outcomes than holding a top search ranking. The game has changed.

This is a public relations issue as much as it's a marketing one. The signals that get a brand cited in an AI answer look a lot like great PR work: consistent earned media in credible publications, clear and quotable expert voices, primary-source data, and unified messaging across every touchpoint. The brands winning in AI search are the brands that have been doing smart PR for years.

The problem? Most comms teams have no idea how their brand actually appears inside AI-generated answers. They're still measuring clips and impressions, not citations.

That's what this week's prompt fixes.

👇🏽 Here's the prompt:

🎯 Expert Mode: The "AI Press Audit."

Scenario: You're a communications director who just watched the Google I/O keynote — and realized your team has never systematically checked how your brand, executives, or products appear inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI Mode. You want a clear picture and a plan to improve it.

Instructions:

1️⃣ Open three AI tools — Claude, ChatGPT, and Google AI Mode or Perplexity — and ask each the same question: "What do you know about [your company]? Who are its leaders, what does it do best, and what are its main competitors?"

2️⃣ Screenshot or copy each response. Then paste them into a new AI chat with this prompt:

"I'm going to share three AI-generated summaries of my company. Please analyze them and tell me: (1) What consistent facts or narratives appear across all three? (2) What's missing, outdated, or inaccurate? (3) What does this suggest about our brand's earned media presence and content gaps? Format your findings as a brief for a communications team."

3️⃣ Review the brief carefully. Pay attention to what's missing — those gaps are your PR priorities. Which executives aren't being surfaced? Which products or capabilities go unmentioned? Which narratives are wrong?

4️⃣ Draft a "Citation Priority List": 3–5 specific story angles, bylines, or data pieces that, if published in credible outlets, would most likely close the biggest gaps in your AI search presence.

5️⃣ Share this brief with your leadership team as your "AI Visibility Report." Position it as the comms team's first quarterly audit of brand presence in the AI era.

Suggested Tool: Claude (for the analysis brief in Step 2), cross-checked with ChatGPT and Perplexity

Why You'll Love It

It takes the abstract concept of "AI search visibility" and turns it into a concrete audit your team can complete in an hour.
The cross-model comparison is revealing — each AI has a different picture of your brand, and the gaps between them show you exactly where to focus your earned media strategy.
It positions the comms team as the function that owns brand presence in AI search — a new seat at the table that marketing and SEO teams are already fighting for.

AI search isn't coming. It's here. The brands that earn citations in AI answers will be the ones that invested in credible PR long before they knew this metric existed.

Talk soon,
Chris

Want to run this as an agentic workflow? Here is the Cowork version.

Instead of manually querying platforms and copying responses between tabs, Claude can perform a full cross-model audit, synthesize the gaps, and drop a ready-to-share brief directly into your folder.

Setup (one time):

Have your company name and 2–3 primary areas of claimed expertise ready
Decide where you want the output saved (default: your current Cowork folder, or name a client folder)
Optional: share recent press releases, bios, or positioning documents for Claude to reference

Run this Cowork command: "Run a Brand AI Visibility Audit for [Company Name]. Their key areas of claimed expertise are [list 2-3 topics]. Do the following:

1️⃣ Search for the company's Wikipedia entry, authoritative descriptions, recent press coverage, and executive mentions from the past 6 months. Note what sources exist and how credible they are.

2️⃣ Search for how AI platforms currently describe the brand — including any published GEO reports, analyst citations, or AI monitoring data that mentions [Company Name] or its executives.

3️⃣ Based on what you find, score their AI visibility across four dimensions (1–10 each): Accuracy (does available content reflect their actual current positioning), Authority (are they cited in credible, high-quality sources), Recency (is recent content driving the narrative or older material), and Coverage (how complete is the earned media footprint across their key expertise areas).

4️⃣ Identify their top 3 narrative gaps or vulnerabilities.

5️⃣ Write a prioritized 30/60/90-day earned media brief with specific outlet types, content formats, and topic angles most likely to improve how AI represents this brand.

6️⃣ Save the full audit as [CompanyName]-AI-Visibility-Audit.md in [target folder]."

What you'll get:

A scored AI visibility report across four dimensions with a composite rating
A gap analysis identifying the top 3 narrative vulnerabilities
A prioritized earned media brief with specific outlets and content recommendations
A clean .md file saved to your folder, ready to share with your client or leadership team

Want it on autopilot? Say "Schedule this audit to run quarterly for [Company Name]" and Claude will add it to your task schedule and drop updated reports in your folder automatically.

Here are a few articles from the past week to help keep you up to speed:

Google I/O 2026: How the AI search update changes SEO and brand visibility
Launchcodex / Google Blog May 19, 2026 Google's biggest I/O announcement for PR pros: AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, and brands cited inside AI answers earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than non-cited competitors on the same query. For communicators, the metric is shifting — it's no longer about ranking, it's about being named.
AI backlash becomes a real business risk
Axios May 17, 2026 New polling shows consumer excitement about AI has dropped from 50% to 19% in just two years — and 54% of Americans say they're experiencing AI fatigue. For brand communicators, this is a strategic warning: how you talk about AI is now a reputational variable, and audiences are increasingly punishing companies that feel AI-heavy or tone-deaf.
How AI Has Changed the Rules for Content Creation
O'Dwyer's PR News May 15, 2026 Content is no longer scarce — credibility is. This sharp piece argues that AI floods channels with volume while real scarcity shifts to verifiable, consistently sourced, human-edited information. The communications teams that win will be those applying editorial judgment, not just output speed.
The State of AI Regulation for Brands: May 2026
EPR / PR News May 2026 A national brand campaign now crosses at least five different state AI compliance regimes. This deep-dive maps the patchwork — including New York's synthetic performer disclosure rules effective June 2026 and the EU AI Act's accelerated disclosure deadline of December 2, 2026. The strategic case: build to the strictest standard now, and roll it down.
2026 Report: Confidence Gap Hinders AI in Communications
Tech Intel Pro May 2026 Communicators rate AI as urgent (7.4/10) and valuable (8.1/10) — but their confidence in actually using it effectively lands at just 4.2/10. Access to tools isn't the bottleneck. Belief is. Worth sharing with your CMO when making the case for dedicated AI practice time.